Chapter Twenty-Eight
I’d seen Stella be dramatic.
I’d seen her throw open the tea shop door in a swirl of velvet and sarcasm. I’d seen her glare a kettle into boiling faster and smile at people in a way that made them reassess their life choices.
I had never seen her turn.
Not like this.
The moment my brain finally caught up with what we were seeing through the window, something in the air shifted, sharp and metallic.
Stella went still.
Not her usual theatrical stillness—this was deeper, older. The kind of stillness that belongs to predators and statues and things carved out of darkness.
Her spine straightened, smoothing an invisible century of pretend frailty from her shoulders. Her eyes, usually a warm, mischievous dark, went flat and bright all at once, pupils narrowing to thin slits.
Her teeth… lengthened.
It was subtle at first, a glint when her lip curled, but then I saw the fangs drop properly, sharp points catching the light. Her skin seemed to pale and tighten, not in a withering way, but like marble under moonlight.
Stella the tea witch went away.
In her place stood Stella the vampire, full stop.
My breath caught.
Beside me, the Silver Wolf’s human form shivered like heat haze. Her muscles thickened, bones shifting beneath skin in ways that made my own joints ache in sympathy. She stepped back from the window and let go.
Skin rippled into fur, gray and silver washing over her like poured metal.
Her face elongated, eyes turning pure predator gold.
In the space of a heartbeat, Keegan’s mother was gone, and the wolf stood where she’d been, bigger than any natural wolf had a right to be, hackles raised, lips peeled back from long white teeth.
The air itself flinched.
My dad’s change was subtler but no less real.
The lines around his mouth deepened, his jaw setting with that stubborn, bulldog determination that had carried him through years of curse and exile.
His hands curled into fists on the table, knuckles whitening.
I felt the wolf in him surge forward, pressing against his skin, held back only because he hadn’t given it permission yet.
Bella didn’t hesitate.
One second, she was a jittery, freckled woman with wild hair and bright eyes.
The next, she arched her back, and her magic rippled out in a copper-gold flash.
Fur burst along her arms, her fingers shortening, nails sharpening into tiny claws.
Her nose elongated in a dainty little fox muzzle.
Clothes blurred and adjusted, courtesy of some very clever shifter spells, and then a sleek fox stood in the middle of Stella’s tea shop, tail fluffed, ears pinned back, a low growl rumbling in her throat.
Ardetia stepped away from the table and into a patch of shadow that hadn’t been there a moment before.
The light bent around her, as if trying not to touch.
Her eyes went from gentle, wary to something brighter, frost-edged.
A faint shimmer danced over her skin in tiny, crystalline motes, like the moment ice starts to form on water.
Nova moved too, staff in hand, but she didn’t rush to the window. Instead, she took a position slightly back and to the side, where she could see both the street and the rest of us at once. Her jaw clenched; the runes on her staff lit one by one, responding to her call.
The tea shop, the cozy refuge, the place of pastries and gossip, had just become a war room.
I forced myself to look outside again.
Shadows were rolling through the street.
Not natural shadows—the kind cast by clouds or people. These were thicker, moving with intent, sliding along the cobbles and up the walls like oil poured in slow motion. They reached for doorways, curling around lampposts, seeping into the cracks between stones.
The glass of the windows fogged from the outside, white breath spreading in delicate, creeping patterns. Frost feathered across the panes in jagged spirals.
Stonewick was being… touched.
Claimed.
My lungs forgot how to function for a second.
Movement flickered at the edge of my vision.
I saw shopkeepers in the square step back, instinctively retreating from the roiling dark.
Faces appeared in upper windows, pale and startled, then vanished as shutters were pulled closed.
The ordinary, mundane magic of the town’s life tucked itself in, ceding the streets to whatever was coming.
The gargoyles on the inn across the street stood stout.
“Everyone away from the glass,” Nova said sharply. “Now.”
Her voice snapped the spell of stunned stillness.
Chairs scraped. People moved.
Keegan’s hand seized my arm and pulled me back from the window before my feet fully remembered how to cooperate. I didn’t protest. The urge to press closer, to see more, fought with the urge to run in exactly the opposite direction.
I compromised by letting him steer me to a spot where I could still see, but where, hopefully, I wouldn’t be the first thing snatched through the glass.
“What is that?” Twobble breathed, pressed up against the side of a display case. His ears were flat against his skull, which I’d only seen once before, during Malore’s attack.
“The bill,” Ardetia murmured. “Coming due.”
Skonk gripped his notebook so tightly that the pages crumpled. For once, he didn’t try to write anything down.
My mother stepped closer to the window, hand lifting as if to protect it.
Her eyes were big, pupils blown wide, breath shallow.
I saw recognition dawn in her face before she spoke, a kind of old, deep horror that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the girl she’d been before leaving Stonewick.
“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no.”
“Mom—?” I began.
She hissed.
Not like a human. Like a frightened animal defensively baring its teeth.
The sound cut through the room. Everyone looked at her.
“She shouldn’t be able to be here,” My mom said, the words tumbling now, edges sharp. “Not this easily. Not like this. The Wards—”
“She’s riding the crack,” Nova said grimly. “The one opened by the attempted circle. The Hollow flexed. The Hunger Path shuddered. It left a seam. She found it.”
Stella’s lip curled, exposing more of those very sharp, very capable fangs.
“Of course she did,” she muttered. “Parasites always find the new blood.”
My butterfly mark burned.
Not the bright, almost-warm burn of the Wards or the Academy.
Cold.
Shadows outside coalesced.
They pulled inward, like smoke being drawn into a funnel. The rolling dark that had filled the square shivered and then tightened, threads of it twisting together, braiding into a taller, denser shape.
The temperature in the shop plummeted. Breath puffed like icy clouds in front of mouths. The kettle on the stove rattled like its metal bones ached.
“She?” I said, though I already knew. Some instinct in my bones knew.
Mom’s fingers dug into the fabric of her skirt.
“She’s here,” she whispered. “The high priestess.”
“The high priestess of Shadowick,” Ardetia echoed softly. “In Stonewick. In person.”
“Stonewick isn’t a stage for her theatre,” Stella snapped. “She doesn’t get to waltz in here like she owns the place.”
The Silver Wolf snarled, hackles bristling, claws scraping against Stella’s polished floor. My dad’s eyes went a shade more amber, the canine in him pressing harder.
My heart crawled up into my throat.
The high priestess.
My other grandmother.
The woman I’d seen only in fragmentary visions and nightmares and the uneasy flash of Gideon’s almost-respectful, almost-afraid descriptions.
She was here.
Not in a dream. Not behind a mirror. Not through the Luminary’s interference.
Here.
The shadows tightened in the middle of the square.
A figure stepped out of the darkness.
She was… smaller than I’d imagined.
Not tiny, just… compact. She wore black that swallowed light, layered fabrics that shifted between velvet and something thinner, like smoke. Her hair was silver-white, but not in an old, frail way—in the way of steel filaments, catching what little light remained and twisting it cold.
Her face…
It was like looking at a sharper, harder version of a reflection I’d never taken.
High cheekbones. A narrow jaw. Eyes pale as winter sky, blue washed with gray. Lines carved at the corners of her mouth that could be laughter, or cruelty, or both.
She smiled.
It did not reach her eyes.
My mark flared, hard enough that I bit back a sound.
She lifted her hand.
The shadows around her stilled, shivering into obedience.
Then, in a voice that slid straight through glass and stone and skin, she called:
“Maeve Una Bellemore.”
My whole name.
The windows shuddered.
Not from volume…she wasn’t shouting. If anything, her voice was almost conversational. But the sound of it carried a weight that had nothing to do with lungs. It was like the words themselves were hands, rapping on every surface in the village at once.
The tea shop’s glass rattled. A hairline crack etched itself across the corner of one pane with a tiny, protesting tink.
The bell above the door chimed.
“Nope,” Twobble squeaked. “No, thank you. Wrong address. She must mean some other Maeve Una… Uvula… Bell-melon—”
“Twobble,” I said, or tried to. My tongue felt thick.
He clapped his hands over his ears.
“If I can’t hear her, she can’t own my soul,” he muttered.
Skonk, white-faced, reached up and gently pulled one of Twobble’s hands away so he could still hear us. “That’s not how auditory magic works,” he whispered.
“Let me have this,” Twobble hissed back.
My heart was pounding so hard it shook my whole body. The mark over my hip pulsed in time with it, a cold, aching throb.
“Maeve,” Mom said, voice tight.
I turned.
She looked more afraid than I’d ever seen her. Not the fear she’d had when Malore attacked, or when the Wards weakened. This was older. Deeper. The fear of a younger version of herself, standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, hearing a voice like that call someone else’s name.
“She knows you’re here,” my mom said. “Of course she knows. She’s felt you from the beginning. Since you opened the Academy. Since you stepped into the neutral ground. You’re… loud, Maeve. In the magic.”
“I’ve been told,” I croaked.
Keegan was at my side, close enough that our shoulders touched, one hand hovering at the small of my back like he wanted to grab me and bolt, but knew there was nowhere to go.
His eyes were fixed on the square. On her.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “I hate that I’m about to say this, but: I really miss the problem where Gideon just didn’t show up.”
“That problem was simpler,” I agreed.
The high priestess turned her head lazily, scanning the buildings that ringed the square as if she had all the time in the world. Shadows clung to her like a cloak, slipping along the cobbles when she moved. Frost traced the edges of shop windows as her gaze passed them.
Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked once, sharply, then cut off.
She looked, for all the world, like a woman in a park, waiting for someone to join her on a walk.
I knew better.
Elira’s impressions, the dragons’ cryptic warnings, Gideon’s cold respect—they all threaded together in my head, painting a picture more alarming than anything my imagination could have conjured alone. No wonder they’d told me I was getting ahead of myself. They knew he wouldn’t show.
“She shouldn’t be able to stand there,” Nova murmured. “Not without the Wards shrieking. Elira’s holding like hell.”
“How is she here at all?” I asked. “I thought the Wards wouldn’t let her through.”
“It’s not letting her in,” Nova said. “This is… an extension. A projection with teeth.”
“Teeth,” I repeated. “Great.”
The high priestess lifted her hands slightly.
The fog on the windows thickened, then cleared in a sweeping motion, like someone wiping condensation from a mirror.
Her gaze swept Stella’s tea shop.
And stopped.
On me.
I knew, in that instant, that she saw me.
Not just my face, pressed back from the window, but the shape of my magic, the way the Luminary had touched me, the threads I’d tangled myself in: Academy, Wards, Stonewick, dragons, wolves, goblins, ghosts.
Her eyes narrowed the tiniest fraction.
She smiled again, more genuinely this time.
“Maeve,” she said, and the way she spoke my name was different now, no full middle name, no last name. Just Maeve. Intimate. Proprietary.
I swallowed hard. My throat felt sandpaper-dry.
“She can’t come in here unless we invite her, right?” Twobble whispered out of the corner of his mouth. “Tea shop rules? Vampire rules? Somebody’s rules?”
“This isn’t vampire lore,” Stella said, voice like powdered glass. “This is priestess arrogance. Entirely different etiquette.”
“But she’s your—” Bella started, fox ears flat, then stopped herself.
My grandmother.
The word felt strange in my mouth, attached to that woman. Grandmothers were supposed to smell like cookies, lemon oil, and occasionally roses.
This one smelled, at least from here, like old iron and cold.
“Maeve Una Bellemore,” she called again, softer this time, but the windows still shuddered, the crack in the corner widening a hair’s breadth. “Come out, child. We have much to discuss.”
The town held its breath.
So did I.
The stakes, which had already been high, climbed like reckless teenagers up the side of a cliff.
The circle had failed.
Gideon was missing.
The hunger path was still open.
And the high priestess of Shadowick had skipped the subtle games and come to my doorstep, calling my full name like a summons.
I stood in Stella’s tea shop, surrounded by wolves and witches and fae and goblins and one very offended vampire, my heart punching my ribs, my magic humming like a frightened hive.
For a split second, all I could think was stupidly, wildly mundane:
This is really not how I wanted to meet my grandmother.